she was preparing for an appearance with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, and she was bright-eyed and bubbling. "I haven't played in New York for four years," she said, "and this time 111Y mothèr is going to hear me at Carnegie, which she never did when I was little." lVliss Slenczyn- ska is still quite little-standing only a trim four feet eleven and three-quar- ters-and she told us that when she was a child her size was something of a prob- 1 " WI " h . d " h em. 1Y, s e saI, t ere was nne time in Sweden when they insisted I was an adult midget, and they wouldn't believe that I was eight, or whatever it was, until a dentist exam- ined my teeth. But that's all over with now . "You know, I love Mitropoulos. A musical friend of mine got me an audition with him a few months ago, and he met me in a dressing gown in his apartment and,told me I had twen- ty minutes. My fingers felt cold, so I played some Bach, which is a very good warmup. Mr. Mitropou10s came closer and closer, and finally he was leaning over me while I played Bach, Chopin, and Beethoven for two hours and a half. You know, nowadays I don't just play the music, as I used to; I try to interpret what the composer meant. If you can express tþe composer)s idea-something beautiful, something to hope for-it is a wonderful thing. I paid a terrific price to learn about music-it wasn't the way I wanted to learn-but I'm happy over it, really happy. My younger sis- ters, Helen and Gloria, would never put up wIth my father. When Helen was given lessons by Father, she would faint every time he became angry, and Gloria just rebelled at the violin. There was nothing my father could do about it. Now that I'm in New York, I'm staying with my mother's brother in East New York, over in Brooklyn. The only thing musical out there is a Baldwin piano, which I have in my room, beside my hed. I can practice all day without bothering anyone, since every- bod} there goes to work èar1v in the morning. I'm trying now to be a first-class Interpret- er, which is a very great art. I never had a chance to do it be- fore, you know. My father al- ways wanted things done his way, and I never got a chance to show how I felt But I have no resentment toward him. When he died, in 1951, I 44 pitied him. It's strange, isn't it? Here I am, a perfect specimen of the prodigy pushed along too fast, and yet I may turn out to be a good mature pianist after all." Zoologist I N Macy's one morning last week, a friend of ours, standing by a sweater counter, listened to a salesgirl eXplain- ing to another customer why there was a difference in price between two apparently identical orIon sweaters. "The} do look alike," the salesgirl said, "but obviousl} one of them comes from a better grade of animal." Eggheads M OTOR scooters, the current scourge of sleep in Italian cities, have established a beachhead here, as we found out the Sunday before last, when we braved an early-season snow flurry to attend an organIzation meeting of the American Motor-Scooter Club be- side the dry fountain in Washington Square. The gathering was a compara- tively small one-eight Vespas and seven Lambrettas, to be precise-but that Isn't necessarily any cause for com- placency; after all, look how the J apa- nese beetle, once it got here, throve in our climate. Arriving at the fountaIn shortly after eleven o'clock, we found some ten scooters parked at the curb . . t. . · . . ' "'.0 , . ø _ . ,.. , . . .' . . , ;..." , ..:.... t. I c . . , . .. ." .. .. . . I . c . . . - . . -co ...,,_ . l . \ '. I , I' DECEMßEI\ 8, 1 9 5 and being hovered over lovingly by theIr owners, who were engaged In confer- ences about cOIls, compression ratios, and the like. One of the owners, who seemed to he in charge, was a young man wear- ing a white crash helmet and lying supine on the pavement under hIS blue Vespa- or as far under it as you can get under a \ espa. As each new scooterist arrived, he would extend an arm upward to shake hands. "I'm John A vildsen, one of the club's organizers," he said on one of these occasions. "I'm glad to see you. I knew owners would agree it's time for an American club. After all, the Ital- ian word for 'motor scooter' is 'motor- scooter.' I'm having a little trouble here with my Bermuda belL" "How many miles to the gallon should I be getting on my Lambretta?" a scooterist demanded of the assemblage. A vildsen pointed to a chilled-looking man, a non-scooterlst, who was stand- ing nearby bundled up to the ears In an overcoat. "Ask hIm," he said. "That's Peter Hilden, sales manager of the Lambretta Division of the Innocenti Corporation. Personally, I work for the advertising agency that handles the Vespa Distributing Corporation, but I was interested in scooters before we got the account." "A hundred to a hundred and thirty mIles to the gallon," Mr. Hilden said. We fell into conversation with a husky, genIal man, who introduced him- self as WIlbur de Paris, the Dixieland trombonist. "I've had this just since August, but al- ready I hate to go anywhere without it," Mr. de Paris said, pa tting a shin y red V " I ' d ' espa. gIve up my car, . '" only the Vespa won't hold my .., trombone." A non-scooterist even more chilled-looking than Hilden came up to the group, remarked "Bunch of egg- head motorcyclists," and walked off. We took the opportunity to ask A vIldsen to define the dIf- ference between a motorcycle and a motor scooter. "Scoot- er's got a hundred and fifty cc.s engine displacement, at most; motorcycle, maybe four hundred," he replied. "Be- sides, a scooter's got smaller wheels and won't go much over fifty miles per hour, and you don't sit straddling the . " engIne. "I took my scooter up to Tanglewood List summer for the festival," one scooterist .. . t . . 'It , t r . . · f(,. 5 í [,tI}[